Healthcare has corrupted its mission

Victor Montori’s second edition of his book Why we revolt: A patient revolution for careful and kind care talks about how healthcare has stopped caring. Our current industrial healthcare needs to be replaced by a scientific, unhurried and person-centred care. Patient care needs to be reclaimed as the priority of healthcare organisations.

Medicine has tried to correct this imbalance over recent years in its training and practice (see eg. post on my Relational Psychiatry blog). As expressed by George Engel (1977) when proposing his biopsychosocial model, the fundamental problem is the overemphasis on biomedical aspects of illness at the expense of psychosocial factors. Reform may well not be enough, which is why I like the website of The Patient Revolution, a nonprofit organisation. Managers and funders need to be held accountable for creating and fostering systems that allow patient care to happen. As I said in a previous post, medicine needs to be rethought.